I know a family who undertook an extended European vacation a couple of years ago. With their children nearing the time when they would take wing, it was a final family fling. And they flung well, with stops in several European countries, an extended visit with the family of an exchange student they had hosted, […]

In my previous post, I wrote that site design can be effective at promoting public safety. If land uses are designed to encourage people to be outside or to keep an eye on the public realm even when they’re inside, crime can be reduced. Also, as Charles Montgomery writes […]

I’ve previously written about UrbanPlan, a program of the Urban Land Institute which introduces students to the complexities and trade-offs of land-use decisions. ULI recently updated the UrbanPlan package to include additional elements, such as green roofs, and new voices, such as aging-in-place advocates, to add to the […]

In my last post, I wrote about how our grandparents and great-grandparents yielded our streets to the automobile in the early 20th century, with the result that we’re no longer even allowed to hold block parties in the street.

While behind the wheel yesterday, I came across a group of dozen teenagers trying to cross a street between intersections, an action that is generally called jaywalking. I was driving on an arterial in a Central Valley city, a street with five lanes and a 40 mph speed limit. It wasn’t […]

I have a regular reader who often responds when I write about socialization in urban settings. After living for a number of years in a low-density, west Marin rural neighborhood, the reader and his wife moved several years ago into a moderately dense urban setting, on the outer fringe of what […]

In my last post, I commented about the eastside of Suisun City needing a retail area to develop its walkability. It’s an observation I’ve made previously. But this time I thought about the proximity of the available site to the middle school serving Suisun City and measured that opportunity against […]